Please, Remember Me

Chapter Three - Tidings, Tata's and Trust

November was slowly slayed by December's cold weather and all the holiday tidings and general mania of Christmas. London is the kind of city that does Christmas on steroids. People come from all over the country to shop for gifts no one will ever appreciate and the high-streets become something straight out of Vegas with dancing Santas and enough fairy lights to put us all in a coma.

I was never much for the holidays.

Not because of the parents who died or the Nan who died, but because I never really got it. It's all very superficial and the point of it all is to appreciate people around you, right? Not spend thousands of pounds on crappy things just because you have to.

I don't know, maybe I've always been a bit too cynical but the holidays brought out my grump.

Lizzie was, however, as you'd imagine, a holiday person. She decked out her flat with every tacky piece of holiday decoration she could find. She wore Christmas themed sweaters as early as November and she baked enough cookies to feed armies. She was like a cracked out elf every year around the holidays. She changed her ringtone to some awful track about white Christmases or jingling bells. Most important was her Christmas dinner though.

Every year since I've known her she's hosted a Christmas dinner at her flat for me, her flat mate Madeline who was a more recent addition, and Adam. It was a tradition for us, a tradition some of us was more reluctant to than others.

The amount of times Adam and I rolled our eyes at each other during the months of November and December every year was staggering. But we loved her and dealt. I actually kind of secretly looked forward to it each year.

Since Liz had her own family in Southampton to get to during the real holiday she always staged this dinner on the last Sunday before the actual holiday. On Sundays the bar was closed so we all had the night off every week. She did this frequently during the year too, invited us to dinners, Sunday roasts, and clucked around us like the mother-hen type she was. It was fine, she was a brilliant cook and any time I could get a decent meal in me that didn't consist of premade sandwiches or anything with chips, I was happy.

Every year for her Christmas shindig she told us to dress in our finest and to bring wine. So, I sat on the tube on my way to Hampstead with a bottle of white in my purse and clad in a grey long sleeved, cable-knit dress, a pair of awesome heels I'd only put on because she'd freak and be happy and I could take them off as soon as I walked in the door, and had my hair clipped up into a braided style I'd seen a tutorial for online. I had an hour over, whatever.

I listened to music as I travelled, that was key to navigating the London public transport, always listen to music or people might actually want to talk to you. Which is never okay.

The playlist currently looping on my iPhone was one a certain someone had created for me. Kieran and I had created a playlist each for the other to listen to. We'd gone through favorite movies (his being The Godfather, mine being Gone With the Wind) and TV-shows (anything British comedy, like the original The office, The Mighty Boosh, Fresh Meat, Fawlty Towers and about six thousand others, his being The Sopranos and The Walking Dead) and now we were doing music. The deal was to enjoy all the things the other wanted, so I'd suffered through season after season of Sopranos and zombies and he'd gotten to laugh his arse off at Noel Fielding and Ricky Gervais. Now the music, which was way less time consuming but equally enjoyable.

We'd talked for close to two months now, it would be at the beginning of January. Two fucking brilliant months. Every single day I came home from work there was an email from him or he was online so we could chat. Every day for two months I'd heard from this man who captivated me like no other. Usually two months of constant contact would lead to nothing more to say, topics would run out and you'd be left with silence. But it hadn't happened with us.